Looking at photographs of highways entirely eaten by vines and destroyed shops filled with trash and cobwebs, it’s easy to downplay their tragedy by comparing them to the set of a post-apocalyptic film. All of these images of Fukushima, Japan, taken four years after the earthquake and tsunami that caused the local nuclear power plant to melt down, almost seem too shocking to be real. But they are, and photographer Arkadiusz Podniesinski doesn’t want you to forget it. Within the exclusion zone, contaminated by radiation, lies a haunting ghost town with signs of its abrupt abandonment strewn everywhere you look.

If this all sounds reminiscent of another nuclear disaster, that’s part of the point of Podniesinski’s photo series. The photographer has visited Chernobyl a number of times over the past seven years, documenting its deterioration and subsequent reclamation by nature in the hopes that he could help remind the world that it’s human error that keeps causing these events to occur.

“It is not earthquakes or tsunami that are to blame for the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, but humans. The report produced by the Japanese parliamentary committee investigating the disaster leaves no doubt about this. The disaster could have been foreseen and prevented. As in the Chernobyl case, it was a human, not technology, that was mainly responsible for the disaster.”

“I came to Fukushima as a photographer and a filmmaker, trying above all to put together a story using pictures. I was convinced that seeing the effects of the disaster with my own eyes would mean I could assess the effects of the power station failure and understand the scale of the tragedy, especially the tragedy of the evacuated residents, in a better way. This was a way of drawing my own conclusions without being influenced by any media sensation, government propaganda, or nuclear lobbyists who are trying to play down the effects of the disaster, and pass on the information obtained to as wider a public as possible.”

See dozens more incredible images and read the accompanying story of Podniesinski’s journey through the Fukushima Exclusion Zone on the photographer’s website.

Satellite images and pictures from the ground tell a limited story of one of the world’s most dangerous abandoned places – this flyover footage fills in the gaps, covering the 20-mile nuclear wasteland with uncannily captivating footage.

Postcards from Pripyat was filmed by Danny Cooke on a trip to Ukraine as part of a 60 Minutes story aired on CBS about the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear incident and ongoing efforts to cap the remains of the reactor. Of his adventure, he recounts: “During my stay, I met so many amazing people, one of whom was my guide Yevgen, also known as a ‘Stalker’. We spent the week together exploring Chernobyl and the nearby abandoned city of Pripyat. There was something serene, yet highly disturbing about this place. Time has stood still and there are memories of past happenings floating around us.”

Meanwhile, The Fallout (embedded above) also shows stunning scenes from the same nuclear wasteland as part of a demo shoot for AeroCine shot early last year.

The incident turned Pripyat from a city of 50,000 into a ghost town overnight, and that was just the beginning – fallout spread to neighboring countries and continues to leak out locally. Residents were told to evacuate but that they could return within a few days – a promise that could not be kept. Mice in the area have been recorded as having 10,000 times more radioactivity than normal rodents.

Today, the focus is on containing the problem. “With funds from over 40 different countries, 1,400 workers are building a giant arch to cover the damaged reactor. It will be taller than the Statue of Liberty and wider than Yankee Stadium — the largest movable structure on Earth. Until the arch finally seals up that stricken reactor, and no one knows when that might be, something like that could happen again. Unlike other historic relics, Chernobyl does not belong to the past; its power will never die. Chernobyl is forever.”